That’s your lineup of character types in “Touch of Evil,” the latest edition of the magazine’s annual Hollywood issue. There are probably some pretty good parlor games to be made of that wild bunch — like, what single screen role amalgamates the greatest number of these parts? Or, which actors have played the most types? (I’m pretty sure old “Six Degrees” himself, Kevin Bacon, has scorched his way through more than half of them.)

In years past, the Hollywood issue had no real unifying concept beyond whatever aesthetic sensibility the photographers brought to the task of capturing our chosen performers in still pictures. But once we decided to move into video, our subjects had to have something to do. So last year Kathy Ryan, the magazine’s director of photography, asked them to act out classic, recurring moments in film: man pulls out gun; man flees unseen forces, femme fatale undresses at home after a night out; and so on. This year, Arem Duplessis, the magazine’s design director, suggested having the actors play baddies.

To start, we filled an office wall with what Ryan calls “mood boards of villains in movie roles to get the creative juices flowing” — you can get an idea of what she’s referring to here. Then, with our deputy photo editor Joanna Milter coordinating all — she deserves not only an executive producer credit, but also points on the back end, or whatever it is the power players get in Hollywood — we brought in our artist filmmaker-photographer and started talking to the actors. Sometimes we pitched a role to them, and they accepted; sometimes they had their own villain in mind. (Whereas our impulses tended toward the archetypal, the actors were more likely to propose particular roles in particular films — Nurse Ratched from “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” for example.) But Ryan emphasizes that wherever the original inspiration came from, “basically Alex had strong ideas of what she wanted to do” and took over, adding her own “weird twists.”

That’s Alex Prager, who shot our photos and directed our videos. Prager, whose work is held in the collections of MoMA and the Whitney, among other museums, describes the Hollywood issue as “the dream project” for her, and not just because our mogul Ryan gave her so much freedom on the set. Ever since Prager expanded her 2008 photographic series “The Big Valley” into a short film last year (“Despair”), she has been “slightly obsessed with moving pictures,” as she puts it. (Fittingly, when I spoke to her by phone recently, she was in her car in California — on the freeway, I would like to think, with the Santa Anas stirring things up — going to meet with an actor about a film she’s directing.) And that made her the dream image-maker for us.
These days, the videos we publish online drive the production of the Hollywood issue in print. “The still photography is secondary,” Ryan said. “About 90 percent of the time is spent filming, and only about 10 percent is spent shooting the still photo, because filming is so much more complicated — you’ve got sets, cinematography, costumes, full-on hair and make-up, etc.”

You’ve also got extensive rehearsals with stand-ins beforehand, and then the acting itself. On that score, here’s Ryan with one example: “We were in awe of Glenn Close, so determined to get it just right. She kept asking to do another take to try to perfect it. She came to the shoot on a Sunday night at 6:00 p.m., straight off a plane, and stayed until 11:00 p.m., despite having a call time for her show at 6:00 a.m. the next morning.” After that, Ryan says, “the photo is almost icing on the cake.” (Still, to hear Prager tell it, the icing tastes better thanks to the cake. She says that by filming first, her actors built up their characters, and she got a lot more out of them that way.)

Marvin Orellana for The New York TimesGlenn Close at the shoot with Alex Prager (left) and Kathy Ryan (right).

There is at least one familiar type of villain that we did not include in the Hollywood issue: the Overbearing Film Director. Francis Ford Coppola dragging everyone into the Philippine jungle. Werner Herzog dragging everyone into the Amazonian jungle. James Cameron dragging everyone into the Pandoran jungle. And I’m happy to report that from all accounts our directors, Ryan and Prager, brought no hint of tyranny to their sets. Go back to the top and look at that first photo: does it look like Prager is about to pull some cruel Hitchcockian prank on Kirsten Dunst? And the one below that: is Mia Wasikowska suffering some millionth Kubrickian take?

Hardly. Viola Davis never complained about the ladybugs crawling all over her. Adepero Oduye only did three takes as Bonnie Parker. (We only had three dresses rigged with explosives, anyway.) Ryan Gosling paid to take home the painting made for his video by Vanessa Prager, Alex’s sister (see below). George Clooney “was having a ball doing his Captain Bligh thing,” in Ryan’s words. From her perspective, the actors “have a lot more fun doing this than just sitting for a portrait.”

There’s that. And then there’s the sheer appeal of playing the damned. As William Blake (Madman category?) famously noted, John Milton wasn’t at his best when versifying about angels in “Paradise Lost” — he was, in Blake’s view, “a true Poet and of the Devils party without knowing it.” In other words, Lucifer makes for better art than the heavenly host; villainy is more seductive than virtue. That goes for Hollywood too: the bad guys get the better lines, and they get to chew more scenery (or potato flakes, if you’re George Clooney channeling Captain Bligh in Prager’s snow).

Bruce Grierson wrote this week’s cover story about Ellen Langer, a Harvard psychologist who has conducted experiments that involve manipulating environments to turn back subjects’ perceptions of their own age.Read more…